It’s amazing how two days of national media coverage plus a phone call from Abe Foxman can concentrate the mind.

“It’s almost like the Reichstag fire, kind of reminds me of that,” he said. “After the Reichstag was burned, they blamed the Communists for it and it put the leader of that country in a position where he could basically have authority to do whatever he wanted.”…

“In hindsight, I wouldn’t have used that reference point,” Ellison told The Associated Press in a telephone interview Tuesday. “It was probably inappropriate to use that example, because it’s a unique historical event, without really any clear parallels.”…

Ellison said he had gotten a call Tuesday afternoon from the Anti-Defamation League, an international group that opposes anti-Semitism, regarding the Hitler comparison.

“They told me they understood the point I was trying to make, but they didn’t think it was the right way to use that historical example, because they thought any sort of comparison to the modern world we live in in some way diminishes the horror of the Nazi era,” Ellison said. “I told them I feel they’re right.”

While Ellison was chatting with the AP, his pals from CAIR were describing the Bush administration’s “empower the Muslims” foreign policy and endless rhetoric about Islam meaning peace as Islamophobic. Follow the link and note in particular David Keene’s analogy between CAIR and the Italian-American Anti-Defamation League, a special interest group formed in the early 1970s by alleged mafioso Joe Colombo to mau-mau the cops into laying off mobsters or else face false cries of discrimination. Keene takes the comparison no further than the propensity of the two groups to cry wolf. I wonder if he had something more in mind.